Privacy

After getting the ACS in the mail, this guy calls the Dept. of Commerce to tell him he won't fill it out. They threaten him with a $5000 fine. Instead, he puts the entire 28 page document online. If you were ever curious what's in this thing, here you go.

An essential pillar of democracy is openness. There is no way that people can meaningfully participate in government, even if only by voting for representatives, if they do not have access to accurate information related to government operations. This was well understood by the founders of the US and embedded in the Bill of Rights. Conversely, a salient characteristic of undemocratic systems of all types, such as Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany is a high degree of governmental secrecy.

Washington, D.C. - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch will testify this week at a Senate hearing on facial recognition technology and the privacy and civil liberties risks associated with rapidly growing biometric databases. The hearing is set for Wednesday, July 18, at 2:30 p.m. Facial recognition technology is becoming increasingly sensitive and sophisticated, creating new ways for government and private entities to identify and track people throughout the United States.

A drop in file-sharing following a court ordered block of the Pirate Bay was short-lived, data seen by the BBC suggests. A major UK internet service provider (ISP) said peer-to-peer (P2P) activity on its network returned to just below normal only a week after the measures were enforced earlier this year. Critics had warned the ban would prove ineffective. But the BPI, the music industry trade body, has defended the action. Its chief executive Geoff Taylor told the BBC the group would continue to pursue similar action in future.

Twitter said in its first transparency report that the number of government requests for user information or to block content is rising in 2012. "We've received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011," Twitter's legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post on Monday. The overwhelming number of requests came from the United States, accounting for 679 of the 849 requests for user information. In 75 per cent of the US cases, Twitter gave some or all information.

Though it was voted down by congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns, the NSA's new data center, now being constructed in Utah, will intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of domestic communications including private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as personal data trails such as parking receipts, travel itineraries, and bookstore purchases.